Sun Microsystems and Sybase claim to have created the world's largest, verified data warehouse.

The pair cited an independent audit conducted by monitoring firm InfoSizing which found that their iForce enterprise data warehouse reference architecture, consisting of Sun Fire servers, Sun StorEdge storage sub-systems and the Sybase IQ analytical engine, is the largest recorded.

With a trillion rows of data, Sun and Sybase claim that the warehouse can hold enough data to track the history of all world financial trades on all stock exchanges, or hold enough data to track all credit and debit card transactions in the entire world for the past seven years.

Using its data compression, Sybase IQ needed less than 55 terabytes on the Sun StorEdge storage sub-systems to store the 155 terabytes of input data.

Additionally, support costs and data centre footprint were lower when compared to conventional databases, which would require up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of storage for this example, Sun claimed.

François Raab, president of InfoSizing, said in a statement: "The size of the iForce enterprise data warehouse reference architecture is impressive, but size is only a part of the story.

"Organisations are faced with an exploding volume of enterprise data from online transactions to Radio Frequency ID transmissions."